Scientists Capture Antimatter Atoms in Particle Breakthrough!

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/antimatters-big-sp...

Antimatter captured in major scientific breakthrough

DAVID EBNER
VANCOUVER— From Thursday's Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2010 4:43PM EST
Last updated Thursday, Nov. 18, 2010 10:30AM EST

Antimatter – elusive and volatile – has been captured for the first time, a major step forward in the study of fundamental physics and the origins of the universe.

An international team of 42 scientists, which included 15 Canadians, have trapped 38 antihydrogen atoms – one by one – for a fraction of a second.
More related to this story

The electrodes (gold) for the ALPHA Penning trap being inserted into the vacuum chamber and cryostat assembly. This is the trap used to combine or 'mix' positrons and antiprotons to make antihydrogen.
Media
The desire to trap antimatter

While the experiment itself – conducted at nuclear research lab CERN in Switzerland – is not of Nobel Prize calibre, it could serve as the foundation for future experiments and discoveries of that scale.

The goal is to test fundamental theories of physics and to potentially unravel one of the great mysteries of science. Physicists theorize that there was an equal amount of matter and antimatter created at the Big Bang, yet antimatter somehow vanished.

“It’s one of the really big fundamental questions,” said Michael Hayden, a physics professor at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver and one of the scientists involved in the experiment.

A paper describing the experiment entitled Trapped anti-hydrogen was published Wednesday online by the science journal Nature.

With champagne uncorked and enjoyed, round-the-clock experiments continue in a race with another team of scientists to conduct precise measurements of antimatter. It is believed that at least 100 antihydrogen atoms need to be trapped at once to really study them in detail.

The team of 42 scientists saw the first indications of successful capture about a year ago and the 38 captures documented in Nature happened in the summer. Recent results – which remain undisclosed – are encouraging, said Prof. Hayden.

“Right now, we’re just saying everything is moving nicely in the right direction,” he said.

Trapping antimatter is difficult because matter and antimatter do not get on well with each other. In the words of CERN: “They annihilate when they meet.” So antimatter must be cooled to about 264 C and slowed down enough to be captured in a trap described as a “magnetic bottle.”

The next goal – work is already under way – is to measure “what colour antimatter atoms shine,” according to Makoto Fujiwara, a University of Calgary scientist on the team.

Physics theory dictates the colour will be exactly the same as matter. If not, physicists have way bigger challenges on their hands than corralling antimatter.

What is antimatter?

Antimatter, according to team member Jeffrey Hangst of Aarhus University in Denmark, is the “mirror image of normal matter” – in theory identical but opposite. (Thus, if the universe – human beings included – was made of antimatter, it would look and feel the same.)

Antimatter was believed to have existed at the very beginning of the universe but vanished for unknown reasons. Antimatter has been known and studied by modern science for about the past 75 years. A 1955 experiment at the University of California at Berkeley discovered anti-proton, which led to Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1959.

Antihydrogen was first observed at CERN in 1995. Experiments in 2002 showed that it was possible to create enough anti-hydrogen that detailed observation experiments were in theory possible, if the atoms could be trapped.

Why toy with antimatter?

The goal of experiments with antimatter is twofold. First, to find out why antimatter vanished, and where it went.

Second, the path to that answer – if it is possible to figure it out – includes comparing and contrasting matter and antimatter. In what’s called the “standard model” of physics – involving the structure of space and time, elementary particles and interaction – part of the heart of the theory holds that matter and antimatter behave in the same way.

Now that scientists have trapped antimatter, and can study it in detail, tests of scientific theory are possible. If differences are discovered, fundamental beliefs would have to be rethought.

Fictional antimatter

In the movie Angels & Demons, the sequel to The Da Vinci Code, villains steal antimatter from CERN in a plot to blow up the Vatican. While there is an alluring bomb-and-fuel potential around the explosive nature of matter meeting anti-matter, CERN has two answers. One is that there is “no possibility” of it being used as an energy source, because it would be extremely inefficient. For each unit of energy that goes into producing antimatter, only a tenth of a billionth of a unit of energy results. On the bomb side, CERN says: “[Antimatter] would be very dangerous if we could make a few grams of it, but this would take us billions of years.”

Antimatter in real life

Beyond exploration of fundamental physics, an antiparticle called a positron is the key to an increasingly popular imaging technology in nuclear medicine. The technique produces 3D pictures and, in the realm of cancer, it is commonly used to reveal dangerous tumours.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/18/science/la-sci-trapped-antihydrogen-2010...

The Los Angeles Times

Scientists briefly capture a form of matter's elusive antagonist--antimatter
About 38 atoms of antihydrogen are stored for about two-tenths of a second by researchers at CERN. With some fine-tuning, scientists should be able to make enough antimatter to examine why it doesn't seem to exist in nature.
November 18, 2010|By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times

In Dan Brown's novel "Angels and Demons," villains try to use antimatter generated at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) to blow up the Vatican.

The story is far-fetched, to be sure, but scientists at CERN have now figured out how to trap one type of antimatter — elusive antihydrogen atoms — according to research published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The amount of antihydrogen the researchers stored— 38 atoms, each held for just about two-tenths of a second — isn't enough to power a 100-watt lightbulb for even half a nanosecond, much less blow up a building. But once the new procedure is fine-tuned, scientists should be able to create enough of the stuff to conduct a long-awaited test of one of the fundamental theories of particle physics, said Jeffrey Hangst, a physics professor at Denmark's Aarhus University and the lead author of the study.

Theorists think the Big Bang produced equal parts of matter and its opposite, antimatter. When the two came in contact they should have canceled each other out, leaving behind only a burst of energy.

The universe, however, is full of matter, whereas antimatter doesn't seem to exist in nature, a fact that has had physicists scratching their heads for decades and wondering if their theories are correct. If scientists, through studying the antimatter they now know how to make, were to find that antimatter is somehow fundamentally different from matter, it might help explain why this imbalance exists.

Hangst said his team would like to shine a laser at the stored antihydrogen atoms to see if they behave the same way hydrogen atoms do.

The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that hydrogen and antihydrogen atoms should be identical, he said. "If they're not, everything needs to be reexamined, and textbooks need to be rewritten," he added.

Scientists at CERN, including some affiliated with a rival research team, have been generating antihydrogen atoms in vacuum chambers since 2002. But until now, trapping those atoms has been impossible. As soon as the antihydrogen atoms touch matter — including the walls of the device in which they're made — they disappear.

It took Hangst and his team five years to figure out a way to cool the antihydrogen atoms down to 0.5 of a degree Kelvin, just a half-degree above absolute zero, the lowest temperature theoretically possible. Once the atoms were in this low-energy state, the researchers were able to keep them away from the walls of their container by catching them in a kind of "magnetic bowl" that keeps them suspended in the vacuum in which they're created.

"I think this is a big deal," said Cliff Surko, a professor of physics at UC San Diego who was not involved in the research. Surko predicted that researchers would study stored antihydrogen in a variety of ways.

The CERN team still needs to increase the number of antihydrogen atoms they can produce, cool and store before they can start analyzing the antihydrogen with lasers, Hangst said.

Asked how long before that experiment might be underway, he said, "My stock response is that it should take five years.

"And," he added, "I've been saying that for 18 years."

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2010/11/2010111842055191956.html

Aljazeera

Physicists capture antimatter

Swiss-based institute creates and, for the first time, traps antimatter atoms, one of the biggest mysteries of science.

Last Modified: 18 Nov 2010 06:14 GMT

CERN's Hangst says studying antimatter brings physics a step closer to solving the puzzle of the universe's birth [CERN]

Physicists have created, and for the first time trapped, antimatter atoms, one of the biggest mysteries of modern science, the European Centre for Nuclear Research says.

The Switzerland-based research institute, also known as CERN, said on Wednesday it had produced antihydrogen atoms - the opposite of a hydrogen atom - in a magnetic trap and kept them viable for more than 170 milliseconds.

Holding the antimatter in a vacuum for this fraction of a second allowed the physicists to study the atoms, CERN said in an article in the British journal Nature.

"We're ecstatic. This is five years of hard work," Jeffrey Hangst, a spokesman at CERN, told the journal.

An antihydrogen atom is made from a negatively charged antiproton and a positively charged positron, the antimatter counterpart of the electron.

Experiments have produced antimatter atoms before but only in a free state. That means they instantly collide with ordinary matter and get annihilated, making it impossible to measure them or study their structure.

'A big deal'

"The goal is to study antihydrogen and you can't do it without trapping it," Cliff Surko, an antimatter researcher at the University of California, San Diego, said in Nature.

"This is really a big deal."
A magnetic trap kept the antimatter atoms viable for more than 170 milliseconds [Nature]

Some 38 antihydrogen atoms have now been trapped long enough for scientists to take a look at them in their quest to understand what happened to antimatter after the Big Bang explosion that created the universe.

To trap just 38 atoms, the group physicists had to run the experiment 335 times.

The laws of physics make no distinction between matter and antimatter, which means equal amounts of the two should have been created at the universe's birth.

However, our world is made up overwhelmingly of matter, rather than antimatter. The reason for this remains one of the great puzzles of particle physics.

"This was ten thousand times more difficult than creating untrapped antihydrogen atoms," Hangst, the CERN spokesman, said.

"This inspires us to work that much harder to see if antimatter holds some secret."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/18/cern_antimatter_bomb/

Has CERN made the VATICAN ANTIMATTER BOMB for real?*

By Lewis Page •
Posted in Physics, 18th November 2010 12:23 GMT

So - Dan Brown's turgid blockbuster Angels and Demons, in which a nefarious papal official nicks a vial of antimatter from CERN as part of a complicated scheme to become Pope by menacing the Vatican with explosive destruction. Twaddle? Or actually a perfectly feasible plan ripped from today's headlines, style of thing?
Macroscopic quantity of antimatter as envisaged in Angels and Demons

Just a few minor technical errors here

We here on the Reg particle-meddling desk naturally have no interest in the arcane Vatican rules of succession, the putative Illuminati secret society, the likelihood of finding a priest in the Pope's inner circle who would be capable of flying a helicopter etc.

We merely bring the matter up as it turns out that in fact there really is a team of scientists at CERN - the Organisation (formerly Conseil) Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire - striving to contain unprecedented amounts of antimatter: and they have just announced a major success in this extremely difficult undertaking. Could it be that Dan Brown has actually got one right? Would a tiny, pocketable amount of antimatter really be sufficient to rip the guts out of Rome in a blast equivalent to that of a small nuke?

On the face of it, yes. Antimatter reacts with normal matter to convert the entire mass of both into energy; it is the most powerful type of explosive possible, easily capable of making a global thermonuclear war look like angry cockroaches lighting their farts at each other.

Just a third of one measly gram of antimatter reacting with matter (for instance with the walls of its containment vessel) would cause a 15-kilotonne blast equivalent to that of the atom bomb which destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 - surely enough to wipe out the Vatican and quite a lot of Rome too.

QED: everything you read in Dan Brown books is true. Better still, the incomparably superior fiction of Star Trek might also be on the verge of becoming reality with antimatter at last available as a power source. As all Trekkies know, the Enterprise's warp drives were powered by a matter/antimatter reaction.

Whoa there! Not so fast.

First off, we're sorry to report that the international boffins of the ALPHA collaboration at CERN have succeeded in trapping only a sub-ultra-minuscule amount of anti-hydrogen, not even close to the milligrams range.

"We've been able to trap about 38 atoms, which is an incredibly small amount, nothing like what we would need to power Star Trek's Starship Enterprise - or even to heat a cup of coffee," says Rob Thompson, Canadian physics prof and member of the ALPHA group.

He's not kidding: each atom of nega-hydrogen masses something like 1.67x10-27 kg. Thirty-eight of them converted to energy according to Einstein's famous and pleasingly simple-enough-for-hacks equation E=mc2tells us that should a rogue Vatican official manage to abscond with Thompson's antimatter stash and annihilate it in the heart of the Catholic Church, he would liberate approximately 11 billionths of a single measly joule. And in fact it's even worse than this: the ALPHA experiment didn't contain its 38 anti-atoms all at once.

http://www.economist.com/node/17519760?story_id=17519760&fsrc=rss

Gotcha!

Antihydrogen atoms are captured for the first time

Nov 18th 2010
The matter- antimatter annihilation transduction tweeters are overheating…

THE history of physics is littered with the detritus of once-sacred assumptions. As better technology enables more exacting experiments, phenomena that were once scoffed at as impossible become the new norm. For this reason, physicists have long been searching for more sensitive means of probing the realm of antimatter, which theory holds should mirror the familiar world of matter. If precise comparisons of the two were to turn up differences, that would signal a fundamental flaw in understanding of the universe.

Now, a team of scientists working at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory, has announced a breakthrough in the quest for such tests. In the current issue of Nature, members of the ALPHA experiment report that they have been able to trap a very small amount of antihydrogen—the simplest type of anti-atom—for the first time. Since the hydrogen atom is one of the best-measured systems in all of science, this opens the door to a series of experiments testing just how similar matter and antimatter really are.

The symmetry between particles and antiparticles is woven deep into the foundations of physics. For each particle there should be a corresponding antiparticle with exactly the same mass and lifetime but with an opposite electrical charge. Bring the two together and they annihilate each other in a flash of energy. When anti-electrons (or positrons, as they are usually called) orbit antiprotons and antineutrons, the resulting anti-atoms should have the same energy levels as the common or garden variety. Furthermore, it is thought that gravity should pull on matter and antimatter in just the same way.

In reality, no one has ever been able to drop an anti-apple and watch it fall down (or up), and the antimatter produced in particle colliders is so energetic that it is hard to examine with the tools of precision physics. For decades, physicists at CERN and elsewhere have been trying to overcome these limitations with antihydrogen, which consists of a single positron orbiting a single antiproton. By shining laser light onto hydrogen or antihydrogen and observing which wavelengths are absorbed, the energy levels of the two can be compared in detail. And since hydrogen is electrically neutral, it should be possible to observe gravity’s tiny tug on it without the confounding effects of electrostatic attraction to other particles.

Antihydrogen atoms were produced in the past by several experiments at CERN. But they were so energetic that they immediately bumped into the walls of the experimental apparatus and were annihilated. Since then several teams have been trying to make colder antihydrogen and to hold on to it using clever configurations of electrical and magnetic fields. This is what ALPHA has just succeeded in doing.

Coaxing hot and bothered antiprotons and positrons to couple is quite a task. The magnetic traps employed to hold the antihydrogen are only strong enough to confine it if it is colder than around half a degree above absolute zero. The antiprotons themselves, which are produced by smashing regular protons into a piece of iridium, are around 100 billion times more energetic than this. Several stages of cooling are needed to slow them down before they can be trapped, forming a matchstick-sized cloud of around 30,000 particles. The positrons, produced by the decay of radioactive sodium, are cooled into a similarly sized cloud of around 1m particles and held in a neighbouring trap.

The antiprotons are then pushed into the same trap as the positrons and left to mingle for a second or so. In that time some of the particles get together and form antihydrogen. Next, an electrical field is used to kick out any remaining positrons and antiprotons. The electrically neutral antihydrogen atoms are left behind.

To test whether any antihydrogen was actually formed and captured in their trap, the ALPHA team turned off its trapping magnet. The antihydrogen was then free to wander towards the walls, and thus annihilation. The detectors duly observed 38 bursts of energy which the team concluded came from antihydrogen atoms hitting the wall of the trap.

Although the number of trapped atoms recorded was small, the team is optimistic. It has developed better techniques for cooling both positrons and antiprotons, which should allow it to trap more anti-atoms. Soon it will be able to see just how contrarian antimatter really is.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372994,00.asp

Antimatter Breakthrough Could Lead to Starships, Says Scientist

By: Peter Pachal

Scientists at CERN, the research facility that's home to the Large Hadron Collider, claim to have successfully created and stored antimatter in greater quantities and for longer times than ever before.

Researchers created 38 atoms of antihydrogen – more than ever has been produced at one time before and were able to keep the atoms stable enough to last one tenth of a second before they annihilated themselves (antimatter and matter destroy each other the moment they come into contact with each other). Since those first experiments, the team claims to have held antiatoms for even longer, though they weren't specific of the duration.

While scientists have been able to create particles of antimatter for decades, they had previously only been able to produce a few particles that would almost instantly destroy themselves.

"This is the first major step in a long journey," Michio Kaku, physicist and author of Physics of the Impossible, told PCMag. "Eventually, we may go to the stars."

For now, scientists are interested in producing antimatter in these relatively large quantities because it could lend insight into fundamental physical laws. It's generally believed in the scientific community that at the universe's creation, both matter and antimatter existed but not in the same quantity, so when the two annihilated each other, only matter remained. That could be because antimatter behaves differently than the regular variety.

"It's a fundamental tenet of physics that antimatter and matter behave very similarly although not exactly," said Lawrence Krauss, physicist and author of The Physics of Star Trek, in an interview. "And in order to really test that, you need anti-atoms. Being able to test the properties of antimatter at a whole new level of precision is obviously important."

Further into the future, Kaku believes we may be able to use antimatter as the "ultimate rocket fuel," since it's 100 percent efficient – all of the mass is converted to energy. By contrast, thermonuclear bombs only use about 1 percent.

"One of the main uses of antimatter would be a starship," said Kaku "Because you want concentrated energy. And you can't get more concentrated than antimatter."

Producing large quantities of antimatter is impossible today, Kaku admits. But with the right developments, he thinks it could become a reality: "These machines were not specifically designed to create antimatter. These machines are all-purpose machines. But with time, price goes down, mass production, better technology, and dedicated machines we could reduce costs considerably."

Krauss isn't as bullish as Kaku on the long-term applications of antimatter. Even though he is the author of The Physics of Star Trek, Krauss had just one thing to say when asked about antimatter-powered starships.

"Don't hold your breath."

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/1118/Antimatter-breakthrough-could-help-sc...

Antimatter breakthrough could help scientists unravel Big Bang mystery

Antimatter research took a significant step forward when scientists for the first time created and briefly corraled antihydrogen. The experiment could help scientists probe why the universe has less antimatter than prevailing theories suggest it should.

Untrapped antihydrogen atoms annihilate on the inner surface of a trap in this photo taken by the ALPHA annihilation detector at CERN. Scientists at CERN, the world's biggest physics lab, said they have achieved a breakthrough in the hunt for antimatter.

CERN/AP

By Pete Spotts, Staff writer / November 18, 2010

In a feat akin to capturing lightning in a bottle, physicists have created and for the first time briefly captured antihydrogen, the antimatter counterpart to the simple hydrogen atom.

For more than 20 years, physicists have been looking for ways to create and study antihydrogen as a way to gain insights into processes that allowed the universe to evolve from a hot, roiling soup of subatomic particles shortly after the Big Bang some 13.6 billion years ago into the cooler collection of planets, stars, and galaxies astronomers observe today.

The experiments yielding the result represent an important step toward designing tools that will create and maintain large numbers of these antimatter atoms long enough for scientists to study them in detail.

"Being able to study these particles brings us closer to understanding the composition of antimatter and the physical properties of our universe," says Paul Nolan, a physicist at the University of Liverpool in Britain and a member of the team reporting the results in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

The experiments were conducted at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, located outside Geneva along the Swiss-French border.
What is antimatter?

Like a hydrogen atom, which consists of an electron orbiting a single proton, antihydrogen is made up of two particles – a positron and an antiprotons, the antimatter counterparts to electrons and protons.

The particles are virtually identical in every way, except for two properties, one of which is their electrical charge. An electron carries a negative electrical charge, while the positron carries a positive charge. A proton carries a positive charge, while an antiproton carries a negative charge.

Positrons and antiprotons form in a range of processes in the cosmos. For instance, positrons form as a byproduct of collisions between cosmic rays and matter in clouds of dust and gas between stars.

But they trend to vanish quickly; when matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other in a sudden release of energy.

The Big Bang mystery

This has posed a cosmological conundrum. Current theories hold that when the universe was in its infancy, conditions at the time should have generated matter and antimatter in equal amounts. The inability of matter and antimatter to survive each other should have led to a universe with only a bit of each left as the universe expanded. Yet today's universe holds far more matter than antimatter.

"For reasons no one yet understands, nature ruled out antimatter," says Jeffery Hangst, a physicist at Denmark's Aarhus University as well as a member of the research team for the ongoing project, known by its acronym ALPHA.

In studying antihydrogen in the lab and comparing it with the heavily studied hydrogen atom, physicists hope to pin down the reasons for today's matter-antimatter mismatch.

And there are other burning questions. For instance, does gravity affect hydrogen and antihydrogen in the same way? Or might there be some bizarre difference in behavior between the two?

How scientists did it

Physicists produced the first antihydrogen atoms in 2002, and since then have devised ways to produce them in ever larger quantities. But sustaining antihydrogen long enough for instruments to probe it has proven difficult.

The ALPHA team managed the feat by gathering some 700 million positrons and roughly 10 million antiprotons into tiny clouds, each just under 1 millimeter across. They brought these fly-speck patches of antimatter together, trapping them in a complex set of magnetic fields.

Out of that mix, the team created 38 antihydrogen atoms, which hung around for bout 0.2 seconds before they were released from the magnetic trap and vanished in annihilation events. Detectors along ALPHA's apparatus spotted subatomic particles generated by the annihilation events.

The ALPHA team's results represent "an encouraging step" toward the the goal of conducting detailed studies of antihydrogen, says Harvard University's Gerard Gabrielse, another physicist at CERN working on a different set of antihydrogen experiments. He first proposed the idea in 1987, but one that met with skepticism; few at the time thought antihydrogen could be created and corralled.

The challenge now, researchers say, is to increase the number and survival time of the antihydrogen atoms, as well as design antihydrogen traps that will allow researchers to use lasers to excite the antiatoms and see how they react. Then, they can see how closely they match the behavior of similarly tickled hydrogen.

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/11/17/antimatter-antihydrogen-atoms-trap...

Antimatter atoms held captive by physicists
Last Updated: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 | 5:23 PM ET
By Emily Chung, CBC News

For the first time, antimatter atoms have been caged and kept in existence long enough to be probed by scientific instruments.

"We're very excited about the fact that we can actually now trap antimatter atoms long enough to study their properties and see if they're very different from matter," said Makoto Fujiwara, who led the Canadian contribution to ALPHA, the international collaboration that made the discovery.

The results, published online Wednesday in Nature, mean scientists are closer to solving the mystery of what happened to most of the antimatter in the universe, Fujiwara said.

Antimatter is produced in equal quantities with matter when energy is converted into mass — this happens in particle colliders and is believed to have happened during the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe. That's why physicists are puzzled about why there is no longer any significant amount of antimatter in the universe.
The antihydrogen atoms were made by carefully mixing antiprotons and positrons in this container. The antihydrogen atoms were made by carefully mixing antiprotons and positrons in this container. (ALPHA)

Scientists would like to be able to study antimatter to figure out how it is different from matter, as that might provide clues about the apparent disappearance of antimatter. But there's a problem — when antimatter and matter encounter each other, they both get annihilated, producing pure energy.

Because our world is made of matter, antimatter atoms produced artificially until now have lasted just millionths of a second before hitting the matter walls of their container and getting annihilated.

The latest study, which took place at the CERN Laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, has found a way to trap atoms of antihydrogen away from the walls of their container to prevent them from getting annihilated for nearly one-10th of a second.

Antimatter basics

Particles of antimatter have the same mass but opposite charge to their corresponding matter particle. The antiparticle of a proton is an antiproton and has a negative charge. The antiparticle of an electron — an antielectron, usually called a positron — has a positive charge.

Because these antiparticles carry a charge, they can be contained in electric fields for days and used in experiments. Positrons are used in PET scanners, a medical device used to create three-dimensional images of cancerous tumours and to detect the spread of cancer.

Positrons are produced naturally during the decay of certain radioactive elements, such as carbon-11. They can also be produced in the lab, for example, by blasting gold with high-powered lasers.

Antiprotons are produced in particle accelerators and can also be detected in space when cosmic rays collide with the Earth's atmosphere.

Antihydrogen is made by mixing antiprotons and positrons. The resulting antimatter atoms have a neutral charge, so they can't be trapped in an electric field.

The Canadian team built the electronics for this annihilation detector, which was used to confirm that 38 atoms of antihydrogen had been trapped. The Canadian team built the electronics for this annihilation detector, which was used to confirm that 38 atoms of antihydrogen had been trapped. (ALPHA)"But this neutral atom has a tiny, tiny magnet," said Fujiwara, a research scientist at TRIUMF, Canada's national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics in Vancouver.

The magnet is so small that even using an extremely powerful magnetic field generated by a superconducting magnet, the researchers could only generate a small magnetic force on the antihydrogen atoms. But that was enough to create a magnetic trap that could hold some of them.

"You can only capture really the slowest ones," Fujiwara said.

To improve their chances, the researchers mixed the antiprotons and positrons "very gently" in a very cold vacuum so that they were hardly moving at all.

After trapping the antimatter atoms for some time, the researchers turned off the magnetic field, letting the atoms out of the trap. The atoms immediately hit matter and were annihilated, producing detectable signals. That is how the researchers knew they had successfully trapped 38 of the atoms.

The electronics for the annihilation detector were built by the Canadian members of ALPHA, Fujiwara said.

Richard Hydomako, a PhD student working with Prof. Rob Thompson at the University of Calgary and Prof. Scott Menary at York University played a crucial role in the data analysis, TRIUMF reported.

The next step for the collaboration is to conduct experiments on the trapped antimatter atoms.

University of British Columbia physicist Walter Hardy and Michael Hayden, a physicist at Simon Fraser University, are currently working on a method to find out what colour light the antihydrogen shines when it is hit with microwaves, Fujiwara said.

The colours shone by hydrogen atoms are well known and researchers are interested in knowing how similar antihydrogen will be.

"It's going to be a long effort again. This is a very challenging goal," Fujiwara said.

But researchers are "very excited" about the possibilities.

Forty-two physicists from 15 institutions around the world contributed to the research, including 13 from Canada. Other participating countries were Brazil, Denmark, Israel, Japan, Sweden, the U.K., and the United States.

Canadian funding for the research included contributions from the federal government and the Alberta and Quebec governments, as well as the Killam Trusts.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/11/17/antimatter-antihydrogen-atoms-trap...

Photo: 13 of the 42 researchers involved in the discovery were from Canada, including, from left to right, Makoto Fujiwara from TRIUMF; Andrea Guitierrez and Walter Hardy from the University of British Columbia; Tim Friesen from the University of Calgary; and Michael Hayden and Mohammad Ashkezari from Simon Fraser University. They are shown with their experimental setup at the CERN Laboratory near Geneva. (ALPHA)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/17/MN7K1GDIMN.DTL

UC Berkeley physicists trap antimatter atoms

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
San Francisco Chronicle November 18, 2010 04:00 AM.

Image: Free-ranging antihydrogen atoms annihilate inside a trap at the ALPHA experiment in Switzerland. Image courtesy CERN.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Berkeley physicists seeking to pierce a mystery as old as the universe joined an international team of scientists Wednesday to report they have trapped and stored a few dozen atoms of antimatter - the stuff that annihilates ordinary matter in a single explosive flash of energy.

It's a real-life version of the immortal "Star Trek" fantasy, where antimatter is crucial to speed the Starship Enterprise through the galaxy at warp drive, faster than the speed of light.

And although there's no warp drive in high-energy physics, the announcement marks a major achievement: For the first time, the scientists have stored 38 atoms of the antimatter called antihydrogen for a tiny fraction of a second.

But even greater success is near, said Joel Fajans, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, because the international group will soon be gathering much larger numbers of the antimatter atoms and storing them much longer - long enough for experiments that will seek to explain many of the most fundamental properties of the Big Bang that began the universe.

Fajans and Jonathan Wurtele, also a physics professor at UC Berkeley, joined with other Berkeley colleagues to conceive and design the sophisticated magnetic trap that successfully kept atoms of antimatter from destroying themselves the instant they hit the ordinary matter of the containers where they were made.

Fajans was in Geneva on Wednesday at a celebration of the achievement, and in a telephone interview he explained how cosmologists have long reasoned that the very first instant of the Big Bang must have produced equal amounts of antimatter and the ordinary matter that became all the galaxies, stars and planets.

"But the antimatter seems to have disappeared," Fajans said, "and no one knows why. It's one of the fundamental mysteries of the Big Bang, and now that we know how to store it, we'll soon have enough atoms of antimatter to hold in our hands long enough to study questions like how it behaves in real-world gravity, what its fundamental role was in the evolution of the universe and how it behaves when we excite it with laser beams."

Matter and antimatter are identical in form but opposite in their electric charge. Ordinary hydrogen, the simplest element, is made of only two subatomic particles: a positively charged proton and a negatively charged electron orbiting around the proton like a planet around a star. Antihydrogen, thus, is made of an antiproton and an antielectron, now called a positron.

Scientists succeeded in making the first atoms of antihydrogen 15 years ago, and experiments at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva, have since produced large quantities of them.

But keeping them from annihilating themselves was impossible until the Berkeley group tested the "octupole" magnetic trap that holds them in a powerful magnetic field at temperatures more than 400 degrees below zero. The Brookhaven National Laboratory fabricated the trap.

The Berkeley scientists are members of a physics team at CERN called the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus, or ALPHA. Their report, by 42 scientists from eight nations, is published today in the online version of the journal Nature.

This article appeared on page A - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/17/MN7K1GDIMN.DTL#ixzz15gp4UkSW

http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/289/cache/antimat...

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/11/101118-antimatter-trapped-engine...

Antimatter Atoms Trapped for First Time—"A Big Deal"
But no applications for bombs, energy sources, or engines.
Main Content
Electrodes at CERN that created antimatter.
A detail of the trap used to combine positrons and antiprotons to create antimatter atoms.

Photograph courtesy Niels Madsen, ALPHA/Swansea/CERN
Detection of antimatter particles.

Free-ranging antihydrogen atoms annihilate inside a trap at the ALPHA experiment in Switzerland. Image courtesy CERN.

Ker Than

for National Geographic News

Published November 18, 2010

For the first time, scientists have trapped antimatter atoms—mysterious, oppositely charged versions of ordinary atoms—a new study says.

Though the achievement is "a big deal," it doesn't mean the antimatter bombs and engines of science fiction will be igniting anytime soon, experts say. (See "Antimatter-Rocket Plan Fuels Hope for Star Trek Tech.")

But the feat, undertaken a couple of months ago at the Geneva, Switzerland-based European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), paves the way to the potential solution of a fundamental cosmic conundrum. (Related: "Scientists Ponder Universe's Missing Antimatter.")

Theories predict that antimatter particles and matter particles have opposite electrical charges but are otherwise nearly identical. Whenever the matter and antimatter meet, they self-annihilate in a shower of pure energy.

Yet for all the similarities, scientists think matter and antimatter must differ in some other fundamental way. That's because, even though matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts during the big bang, the universe we know is made almost entirely of matter.

"It's a central mystery in physics," said Joel Fajans, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the new study, published today in the journal Nature.

The unprecedented trapping of antimatter atoms for study is a key step toward understanding why nature seems to abhor antimatter. (Read about a new material that may help explain why matter and antimatter are out of balance.)

Cliff Surko, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, called the trapping of antimatter atoms "a big deal."

"This is the next step, and it's a key next step" toward solving that central mystery, said Surko, who did not participate in the research. "It's a relief to have this step in hand."

Antimatter Bonding Activities

For the new experiments, the team used CERN's ALPHA experiment, a tangle of corrugated pipes, electromagnetic "bottles," and other equipment.

First, scientists had to create antiprotons and antielectrons, or positrons, and get them to bond. This formed atoms of antihydrogen, the simplest antimatter element—a feat first achieved in 2002 at CERN. (Related: "Proton Smaller Than Thought—May Rewrite Laws of Physics.")

To make the antiprotons, the team took some of the protons normally used to feed CERN's nearby Large Hadron Collider, smashed them into metal targets, and captured the byproducts. The positrons were captured from a radioactive sodium source.

To get the antiprotons and positrons to bond, the team used an oscillating electric field, nudging the antiprotons into the same energy level as the positrons.

Next came the hard—and unprecedented—part: getting the antimatter particles to sit still.

Aiming for Permanent Antimatter-Atom Incarceration

The major challenge of trapping antimatter is that, once created, the particles are typically too hot and energetic to be trapped.

Fajans likens the task of antihydrogen trapping to games that involve tilting a toy disk to roll a ball bearing into a dimple or hole.

"If the ball is moving too fast, it won't stick in the dimple," Fajans said. "That was our problem with antihydrogen atoms. They were moving too fast to stay stuck in the traps we were making for them."

To slow them down, the team used a series of electric and magnetic fields to cool the antimatter.

Of the millions of antihydrogen atoms the ALPHA team created, only about 38 were cold enough—and slow enough—to be held in a kind of "magnetic bowl" that prevented them from interacting with normal matter.

Because the experiments were intended only to prove that antimatter atoms could be trapped, the team let the antihydrogen atoms go after only two-tenths of a second. But they hope to drastically increase the incarceration time in future experiments.

"Two-tenths of a second is nice, but forever is even better," Fajans said.

And forever may not be so far away. Since the experiments covered in the Nature study, the researchers have created many more antihydrogen atoms and held them for much longer—fodder for a future report.

According to Fajans, "We're doing much better now."

If more antihydrogen atoms can be produced and trapped for longer periods, scientists might finally be able to study them in enough detail to explain their scarcity in our universe, he added.

No Antimatter Bombs?

John Bollinger, of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, agreed that the new results represent a major step forward—with caveats.

"It is a big deal," said Bollinger, who didn't take part in the experiment, "but more big deals need to be achieved before precise studies can be made—for example, extending the lifetime of the trapped antihydrogen and identifying the state ... of the antihydrogen."

As for real-world antimatter applications, UC San Diego's Surko said that the harnessing of antimatter as an energy source—say, for use in weapons or a Star Trek-style propulsion system—remains a far-fetched idea.

"The problem is that ... it takes so much more energy to make than you get out that it's pretty inefficient," he said. "And you have to go to great lengths to confine it for a long time."

NIST's Bollinger was likewise skeptical. "The amount of antimatter that can be trapped is very small," he said.

"Even if the efficiency of the trapping process is increased, it is fundamentally limited by the amount of antiprotons that can be generated. Therefore I do not see applications in terms of new energy sources or weapons."